Blogging-A Learning Experience

We started a blog to share some of our business experiences and customer stories and, because we were told by the marketing gurus that it would help the visibility of our website on Google, Yahoo, etc. What they neglected to mention is all the new programs, technical terms and problems that have to be learned and solved. We were set up with a very bare bones blog package to be hosted on the same server as our website. In fact, one expert who looked at it, compared it to renting an office in a modern high rise office building and the finding that there were no walls, floor or ceiling and no building security.

The first problem was spam. We have a very effective spam block on our basic website, but, somehow, this never was applied to our blog. We then became the target for so called “comments” from automated eastern European programs generating hundreds of paragraphs of gobbledegook all containing links to counterfeit prescription drugs, pornography or attack websites full of viruses. We now have a spam blocker, which seems to be working

The second discovery was the “link building through blog comments” business. We are able to hold all comments to the blog for inspection and approval. This prevents the automatic posting of spam or offensive comments, but it means that we still need to screen all comments that are not excluded by the spam blockers. The trick is to separate genuine comments and suggestions from the link building efforts of such sites as “myweightlosssecrets.com” or “makemoneyonline.com”. The temptation is to leave them as comments because they might help our back links and visibility, but we are not sure.

The third issue was one  we anticipated, which is the tyranny of a weekly of twice weekly post while trying to manage the real value added parts of the business such a marketing, sales and cost control. I must admit this gets easier as we just now write about whatever interesting has just happened to us and our wonderful customers.